...they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates...
- Chapter 107
I'm looking forward to Bill Petit's talk at Arrowhead this weekend (details in
this post). He is the keeper of
The Moby Dick Collection, an ever-growing stockpile of
hard-copy editions of our cherished text.
Highlights of the collection are posted on
his blog — old and new, hardcover and paperback, English and "non" (Estonian anyone?).
He muses over the various
illustrations of Ahab (right-pegged or left?).
He is especially fond of copies that indicate the reader's relationship with the book. Why did Judith Spiegler cease her
underlinings on page 240? How did tenth-grader Douglas Rogers feel about receiving
M-D as a
mathematics prize (circa 1949)? Did young Vermonter "Pete H." ever finish the novel, after
repeated renewals from the Flynn School library? What's with the
teeth marks on this 1942 Dodd, Mead & Co.?
I suspect that most of us Melvillians have our own, smaller, "Moby-Dick Collections" — editions we've adopted out of a sense of pity, or lust.
Of what use is such a "collection" of apparent duplicates? One benefit was driven home after the
Scholar Chats at MDM16 [
long-story alert]...
Professor Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (U. Conn.) had asked the group if we ever wondered why there were so many
duplicates in
M-D: two departure ports (New Bedford and Nantucket), two inns, two innkeepers, two would-be mentors (Bulkington and Queequeg) , two (or three) captains (Bildad, Peleg, Ahab) ...and why does Bulkington disappear after the first hundred-or-so pages?
Northwestern University professor Harrison Hayford, she said, had written a paper explaining why.
Back home, the question became, where to find Hayford's paper? A bit of Web searching revealed that it is included in the
Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition. Hey, I have a copy of that! Picked it up for 50¢ at a library book sale, mostly for the rigging diagrams.
Those "duplicate" M-Ds are anything but unnecessary.
BTW, Hayford's
Unnecessary Duplicates is fascinating. He deduces Melville's process of composition from the appearance of "duplicates" and details of word choice.
